Putting out Fires Before They Start: Community Organizing and Collaborative Governance in the Bronx, U.S.A

Putting Out Fires Before They Start: Community Organizing and Collaborative Governance in the Bronx, U.S.A. By: Julissa Reynoso* Abstract This Article summarizes how community-based organizing and local government are breaking with hierarchical systems and are engaged in novel forms of problem-solving under an evolving experimentalist and pragmatist framework. To illustrate, the Article traces the co-evolution of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), a public regulatory agency with a mandate to preserve low-income and affordable rental housing and enforce a local housing code, and of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (Northwest Bronx), a Saul Alinsky-style grassroots community-based organization founded to organize marginalized neighborhoods in response to urban housing decay and abandonment. HPD's hierarchical control of the buildings it owned gave way to a new system of early detection and prevention of deterioration in privately owned housing. This new system relies on local, street- level information pooled by seasoned community-based organizations like Northwest Bronx with an objective of building neighborhood-based, countervailing power. The argument is that this new relationship between local government and community-based organizations makes public * B.A., Harvard University (1997); M.Phil., University of Cambridge (1998); J.D., Columbia University School of Law (2001). The author is currently in the Office of Accountability at the New York City Board of Education and was a junior fellow at Columbia University School of Law in 2005. The author gratefully acknowledges the suggestions and criticisms of William H. Simon, Susan Sturm, Mary Dailey, Michael Manning, Elisabeth Bassin, Laura Gomez, Alfredo Labour, and Kevin Johnson. The author is particularly grateful to Douglas Jaffe for his insightful research and to the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and all the practitioners cited in this article, especially to Mary Dailey. Above all, the author is indebted to James Liebman for his advice and encouragement, and to Charles F. Sabel, without whose mentorship and creativity this Article would never have been completed. Views expressed here are the author's own. Law and Inequality [Vol. 24:213 problem-solving more workable because community-based organizations like Northwest Bronx are one natural focal point for the development of stakeholder participation and the elaboration of pragmatic solutions to public problems. The case study will illustrate how community-based organizations are moving beyond demanding public sector reform and towards a novel form of conflictual participation in the design, revision and implementation of the policies and regulations of local government. Introduction During the second game of the 1977 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers, Howard Cosell of ABC News directed the cameras away from the baseball game and towards a burning building near Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx.1 Cosell then announced to the nation, "there it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning."2 In the 1970s and 1980s, the Bronx exemplified the urban decay of American neighborhoods. The Bronx was particularly affected by a tide of arson and property abandonment that created a housing crisis.3 By the 1990s, however, the Bronx was rebounding. 4 Today, the Bronx is in many ways a model of urban growth. A key piece of this turnaround story concerns the co-evolution of two entities: the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), a public regulatory agency which has directives to preserve low-income and affordable rental housing and to enforce a local housing code, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (Northwest Bronx), a Saul Alinsky-style5 grassroots community-based organization (CBO) founded to organize marginalized neighborhoods in response to urban housing decay and property abandonment.6 Through this 1. JONATHAN MAHLER, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING: 1977, BASEBALL, POLITICS, AND THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF A CITY 330 (2005). 2. Id. 3. See generally JILL JONNES, SOUTH BRONX RISING: THE RISE, FALL AND RESURRECTION OF THE SOUTH BRONX (2002); Arson Destroying New York Housing at a Record Rate, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 10, 1980, at Al; David Reiss, Housing Abandonment and New York City's Response, 22 N.Y.U. REV. L. & SOC. CHANGE 783, 787 (1996) (describing the deterioration of the Bronx). 4. See generally JONNES, supra note 3 (detailing in context the present status of the Bronx). 5. See infra note 102-111 and accompanying text. 6. See infra Section III. Though HPD and Northwest Bronx are situated in New York City, this new form of governance is developing in communities throughout the United States. See KAVITHA MEDIRATTA, INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATION 2006] PUTTING OUT FIRES ongoing co-evolution, HPD focuses less on owning and administering public housing and more on detecting and preventing the deterioration of the existing stock of affordable rental housing.7 Part of this transformation, in turn, involves increasingly close cooperation with Northwest Bronx in identifying and fixing at-risk housing.8 The HPD is finding new ways to monitor and increase compliance with public laws and preserve affordable housing by integrating stakeholders like Northwest Bronx into its problem-solving process.9 At the grassroots level,10 Northwest Bronx relies less on purely adversarial tactics to impose its preferences on public authorities and more on its grassroots knowledge to find and administer innovative solutions to city-wide housing problems, while gaining public power and holding local government accountable." Cooperating with local government has not limited Northwest Bronx's ability to use, when necessary, its independent countervailing power to criticize and pressure HPD. 12 The result of this ongoing joint transformation is a less hierarchical public administration and a less confrontational, but not more docile, community organization. The mutual changes in the HPD and Northwest Bronx are not unique. On the contrary, they arguably illustrate a broad movement away from command-and-control governance, with all the familiar adversarial politics that go with it, toward a set of more collaborative "experimentalist" practices. 13 The traditional AND SOCIAL POLICY, CONSTITUENTS OF CHANGE: COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS AND PUBLIC EDUCATION REFORM 17 (2004), available at http://www.nyu.edu/iesp/publications/cip/ConstituentsofChange.pdf (illustrating this new form of engagement between community-based organizing and government agencies in education reform efforts throughout the United States). 7. See infra Section I. 8. See infra Section III. 9. See infra Section III. 10. Throughout this Article, "community-based organizing" and "grassroots organizing" will be used interchangeably. 11. See infra Section II. Another example of this type of innovative CBO is the Industrial Areas Foundation (JAF) in the Southwest. See Paul Osterman, Organizing the US Labor Market: National Problems, Community Strategies, in GOVERNING WORK AND WELFARE IN A NEW ECONOMY 240, 251 (Jonathan Zeitlin & David M. Trubek eds., 2003). Similarly to Northwest Bronx, the IAF is rooted in the organizing principles of Saul Alinsky, emphasizing civic participation and distribution of power. Id. at 251-53. The IAF is addressing low-income labor markets by developing new forms of job training programs through an initiative called Project Quest. Id. at 254. Project Quest brings together government and local community groups in building worker capacity. Id. at 254-64. 12. See infra Section III. 13. See generally Joshua Cohen & Charles Sabel, Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy, 3 EUR. L.J. 313 (1997); Michael C. Dorf & Charles F. Sabel, A Law and Inequality [Vol. 24:213 command-and-control system is marked by a centralized authority that set specific rules and prescribed inputs for regulated public goods with little or no local stakeholder feedback except through the traditional forms of local politics. 14 Under this model, government-set rules are presumed to be at least workably definitive. 15 In contrast, under an experimentalist regime, government procedures explicitly allow public agencies and stakeholders such as Northwest Bronx to revise norms in the light of lessons jointly learned, in the process, creating and revising standards for measuring performance to discipline the public good and ensure accountability.16 This case study will demonstrate how local government and CBOs are engaging in these new practices, creating new spaces for stakeholder participation. This Article is divided into four sections. Section I summarizes the evolution of local housing regulation and preservation in New York City. Beginning in the 1970s, in response to a housing abandonment crisis that swept New York City, HPD began taking possession of delinquent and neglected private housing units in in rem foreclosure proceedings. HPD soon accumulated an unmanageably vast inventory of distressed properties and properties in code violation and had to rethink its housing preservation and anti-abandonment strategies. By the 1990s, faced with its inability to directly manage the city's housing stock, HPD divested itself of most properties and began developing an elaborate system of property anti-abandonment that directly linked stakeholders like Northwest Bronx with the HPD bureaucracy. Today's HPD emphasizes prevention. Information pooling and process changes eliminate and reduce

Load more